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Athens police cracking down on bogus 911 calls

Athens-Clarke police are cracking down on those who make bogus 911 calls.

They might have dismissed them in the past, but the calls have become too disruptive for dispatchers, who must deal with actual emergencies. The bogus calls also can send officers on wild goose chases.

“A lot of times people don’t think of the 911 dispatchers on the other side of those calls,” said Sgt. Christopher Nichols, who investigates bogus or harassing 911 calls for Athens-Clarke police. “These are people who are wasting the time and effort of dispatchers who have to deal with real emergencies.”

On July 12, Nichols obtained a Superior Court judge’s order for a telephone company to release all records for a phone number that was used to make a prank call earlier in the month.

On July 5, “The caller gave an address in Athens-Clarke County and said ‘thank you’ and then disconnected the call without giving further information,” Nichols said in an affidavit in support of a search warrant for the phone records.

“(Officers) responded to the residence and determined there was no need for police services and the residents had not made the 911 call,” the officer stated in his affidavit.

While checking out the bogus call, the officers could have better used their time investigating or deterring actual crime.

Police send officers to each location where a 911 call originated, even if the caller says the call was made by mistake. That’s because police need to verify that there is no emergency, according to Nichols.

In family violence cases, for example, one party might call 911 only to have the phone snatched away by their partner who tells the dispatcher that the call was made in error, according to police.

That’s why it is standard practice for police to send two officers to investigate 911 hang-ups.

We don’t believe that’s the case here, but we need to find out the reason for that call,” he said. “If this is a case of someone abusing 911, they will be prosecuted.”

Athens-Clarke Police Communications Director Keith Kelley on Friday said dispatchers last year fielded more than 135,000 emergency 911 calls.

Some people misuse 911 by asking dispatchers about the weather, football game starting times and seeking other information, he said.

But police are aggressively tracking down callers who intentionally bother dispatchers or falsely report crimes.

Nichols is approaching his current investigation the same way he did when he was a detective with the robbery-homicide unit.

In obtaining a judge’s order for AT&T to produce phone records, he wrote in his affidavit, the records “will assist in the investigation by determining subscriber information and/or call patterns that will lead to the identity of the person making the 911 call” on July 5.

The last time Nichols made an arrest in connection with a 911 call was in 2011, when he charged a man with unlawful conduct during a 911 call. The man “did use vulgar, obscene or profane language with the intent to harass” the dispatcher, according to the arrest warrant.

The man died last year while his case was pending in court.

Another man last year was charged with multiple counts of unlawful conduct after he called different 911 dispatchers to harass them, complained about their service and “ranting about plum trees,” according to an accusation filed in Athens-Clarke County State Court.

A judge in March sentenced handed him a sentence of three years, with the first 11 months to be served in jail.

Probing bogus 911 calls is a continuation of a crackdown on people who waste police resources that began in 2010, when police saw an increase in the number of people filing false reports of crime.

Athens-Clarke police Maj. Clarence Holeman said at the time that detectives would begin aggressively pursuing people who waste time, money and manpower because false reports had become “epidemic.”

People invent crimes for lots of reasons, like pretending they were the innocent victim of a robbery when their money was snatched during a drug deal. A University of Georgia law student reported she had been beaten, kicked and robbed as she walked home from her job after midnight, and after spending a month on the case, a detective learned she intentionally injured herself in a bid to win the sympathy of a husband who wanted a divorce.

When people falsely report so-called person crimes — rape, child abuse, assault, armed robbery and other violent offenses — they impact the entire police department, from patrol officers who take initial reports, secure crime scenes and look for witnesses and suspects, to members of the forensics unit, who find and collect physical evidence.

Investigators then might spend days and even months lining up interviews, pursuing leads and analyzing evidence only to learn that they’ve been duped.

“If we investigate a case and find it’s false, we will pursue it until we have enough to arrest someone,” Holeman said, “because they are tying up a lot of people’s time, wasting a lot of money and equipment when we can be focusing on real crime.”